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Resilience and Authenticity
Wake-Up Calls follows your journey from grieving daughter to funeral home owner, mentor, and advocate as you transform loss and leadership lessons into a call for humane and compassionate deathcare. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Wake-Up Calls is about much more than my own story. It’s about the moments in life that challenge us, change us, and ultimately call us to become better leaders and better people. When I unexpectedly lost my father, I was suddenly faced with leading our family funeral, cremation, and cemetery business before I felt ready. That experience, along with the many personal and professional challenges that followed, taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
After more than 40 years in funeral service, I realized those experiences could help others, particularly women entering a profession that’s evolving rapidly. Today, women make up a growing majority of funeral and deathcare professionals, yet many still face obstacles in acceptance, mentorship, and long-term career growth. I wanted to offer the kind of guidance I wish I’d had early in my career through honest storytelling, practical leadership lessons, and encouragement.
I’m especially proud that every dollar of proceeds from Wake-Up Calls supports non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing leadership education for both men and women in the profession. That’s an extension of the book’s purpose: investing in the future of our profession and the compassionate leaders who will shape it.
What was the most difficult personal memory to revisit while writing Wake-Up Calls?
That’s not a question I answer lightly, because writing it meant living it all over again.
The most difficult memory was the day my dad died. He died suddenly and at a young age of 53, without warning, and I was eight years into my career at Baue’s when the call came.
But the moment that truly undid me was when I stood alone in his office afterward. The room still smelled like him, pipe tobacco, and his cologne. I found the letter in his desk drawer, the one addressed to my brothers and me that said, “Open if your mother and I are gone.”
And I looked at his chair. I thought, do I dare sit in it? I sat down. And I fell apart.
Through my tears, I actually asked out loud, “Dad, what am I supposed to do now? I don’t know how to run a business. Who will help me now that you are gone?”
Writing that scene meant going back to the girl I was in that moment. A young woman, a new mother, a funeral director who could help other families navigate grief, but had no idea how to navigate her own. I had been raised to be tough. Baues didn’t cry; we plowed through, no matter what.
And there I was, crying in my father’s chair, talking to a man who could no longer answer me.
That was the hardest page of the book to write. And it’s the one I’m most grateful I didn’t skip.
What do you hope young women entering the deathcare profession take away from your story?
More than anything, I hope they see that they belong here and that their voices matter. This profession needs leaders who bring empathy, innovation, resilience and authenticity.
I hope they learn to trust their instincts and embrace opportunities even when they feel unprepared. Some of the most important growth in my own career came from difficult experiences.
I also want them to know they don’t have to do it alone. That’s a big reason I founded the Funeral Women Lead Foundation: to help women “unleash their greatness” and create opportunities for mentorship, leadership development and long-term support for them across every stage of their careers. When we invest in each other, everyone benefits.
Looking back, what leadership lesson did grief teach you that success alone never could?
Grief taught me that leadership begins with compassion. Success often focuses on achievements and outcomes, but grief reminds you that every decision ultimately affects people. Experiencing profound personal loss gave me a much deeper understanding of what the families we serve go through, and it changed how I led my team as well.
It also taught me resilience. Leadership isn’t about avoiding hardship; it’s about learning how to move through it with integrity, courage and grace.
I hope readers come away understanding that our greatest challenges often become our greatest teachers and that compassionate leadership can transform not only businesses but also the lives of others.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue shares the pivotal moments that shaped her into one of the most influential voices in the funeral and deathcare profession. She invites you into the heart of her leadership journey by sharing deeply personal stories and hard-won business lessons, helping you expand your knowledge, develop your grit, and embrace your heart for serving others.
Wake-Up Calls is both a rallying cry and a road map. While women are the future of the profession, they continue to face challenges that cause them to leave in large numbers. Lisa’s mission is to change that. Blending memoir with mentorship, she guides women to become the confident, compassionate leaders the industry needs.
From unexpected challenges to defining breakthroughs, Lisa reveals how each “wake-up call” became a catalyst for growth. Her story is a powerful reminder that women can not only succeed but also transform the profession from the inside out.
Wake-Up Calls: A Journey of Learning to Lead and Succeed in the Funeral and Deathcare Profession
In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue reflects on a lifetime in funeral service, beginning with the shattering 2 a.m. phone call announcing her father’s sudden death and moving through her transformation from grieving daughter and uncertain young funeral director into owner, mentor, coach, and advocate for women in deathcare. The book is both memoir and leadership meditation, shaped around the hard-earned triad of “head, heart, and grit.” Baue writes about inheriting responsibility before she felt ready, learning from mentors, failing in painful ways, changing the culture at Baue Funeral Homes, and finally widening her mission to support a profession that, in her view, must learn to care for its own people as tenderly as it cares for grieving families.
What struck me most was the honesty of Baue’s self-portrait. She doesn’t polish herself into an emblem of effortless resilience. She lets us see the woman sitting in her father’s office, overwhelmed by the smell of his pipe tobacco and cologne, asking aloud what she’s supposed to do now. She lets us see the absurd human details too, such as the roll of toilet paper trailing behind her as she collapses into the arms of her managers. The writing is plainspoken rather than ornate, but it often lands with quiet force because Baue trusts lived experience over performance. I found her strongest when she stays close to memory: her grandfather teaching grit through the bucking ponies Thunder and Lightning, the letter from her father urging the family to sell the business, the professional gatherings where she learned to hold her place in a man’s world, and the aching recognition that leadership can cost a family more than anyone admits in the moment.
I also appreciated the complexity of the ideas. Baue’s insistence on “head, heart, and grit” could have become a slogan, but the best chapters deepen it into something sturdier. Grit is not merely endurance. Heart is not softness. Head is not cold calculation. Together, they become a philosophy of humane leadership, one tested through grief, staffing challenges, business mistakes, work-life imbalance, and the painful 360-degree evaluation that forced her to confront how her own team felt unseen. I was especially moved by the later material on burnout and emotional boundaries, including her distinction between sympathy and empathy while serving the family of a boy whose face so closely resembled her son’s. That scene unsettled me in the best way. It reminded me that funeral service asks people to stand at the edge of other people’s devastation and remain both present and intact. Baue’s larger argument, that the deathcare profession must offer mentorship, fairer conditions, and real leadership development, especially for women entering the field, feels not abstract but embodied.
Wake-Up Calls felt to me like a book born from bruises, not theory. I closed the book with respect for Baue’s candor, her grief, her stubborn tenderness, and her refusal to separate business excellence from emotional responsibility. This is a thoughtful and affecting read for funeral directors, deathcare professionals, women in leadership, family business owners, mentors, and anyone trying to lead with both competence and a living, listening heart.
Pages: 199 | ASIN: B0FMH2SS7B
